Fields Medalist Terence Tao recently sparked a wide-ranging discussion on his blog, arguing that if math is more than just formal proof, the discipline needs to better celebrate the rest of the process. Commentators on Hacker News quickly tied his post to Goodhart’s Law, noting that when a difficult 'proof' becomes the sole target, we end up celebrating the signal of hard work rather than true problem-solving and deep understanding.
For early-stage founders and £500 backers on StakeCrew, this observation hits right at the heart of seed investing. Startup land suffers from its own obsession with neat 'proofs'—whether that is a sleek pitch deck, a quick product launch, or a headline fundraising milestone. But as tools make executing raw technical tasks easier by the day, a finished artifact no longer guarantees that a founder deeply comprehends their market or customer.
If we only celebrate the polished final result, we risk funding builders who optimize for short-term signaling over long-term substance. Backers and founders alike need to pay far more attention to 'the rest of it'—the messy customer discovery, the hard-fought intuition, and the unglamorous problem-framing where real venture-scale value is actually forged.